Waves by Katherine Mansfield

I saw a tiny God
Sitting
Under a bright blue umbrella
That had white tassels
And forked ribs of gold.
Below him His little world
Lay open to the sun.
The shadow of His hat
Lay upon a city.
When he stretched forth His hand
A lake became a dark tremble.
When he kicked up His foot
It became night in the mountain passes.

But thou art small!
There are gods far greater than thou.
They rise and fall,
The tumbling gods of the sea.
Can thy heart heave such sighs,
Such hollow savage cries,
Such windy breath,
Such groaning death?
And can thy arm enfold
The old,
The cold,
The changeless dreadful places
Where the herds
Of horned sea-monsters
And the screaming birds
Gather together?
From those silent men
That lie in the pen
Of our pearly prisons,
Canst thou hunt thy prey?
Like us canst thou stay
Awaiting thine hour,
And then rise like a tower
And crash and shatter?

There are neither trees nor bushes
In my country,
Said the tiny God.
But there are streams
And waterfalls
And mountain-peaks
Covered with lovely weed.
There are little shores and safe harbours,
Caves for cool and plains for sun and wind.
Lovely is the sound of the rivers,
Lovely the flashing brightness
Of the lovely peaks.
I am content.

But Thy kingdom is small,
Said the God of the Sea.
Thy kingdom shall fall;
I shall not let thee be.
Thou art proud!
With a loud
Pealing of laughter,
He rose and covered
The tiny God's land
With the tip of his hand,
With the curl of his fingers:
And after--

The tiny God
Began to cry 

____________________ I don't know much about KM's poetry - it's a revelation to me. This feels more fable than poem, really, although the rhythms and the excellent language are the stuff of poems. These lines will send me off now into Xmas and Summer Holidays - a time of family and food and countryside and reading and writing and relaxation: Lovely is the sound of the rivers,/Lovely the flashing brightness/Of the lovely peaks./I am content.

Merry Christmas to all the talented and generous Tuesday Poets who continue to amaze me each week - especially my kind and creative co-curator Claire Beynon - and to all my wider group of blog-readers who visit here. 

I have been so lucky to have been part of a longstanding book club and a brand new writing group this year (both of which I find necessary and stimulating), and to have met with many wonderful writers via Randell Cottage (of which I'm a trustee), Massey University (where I teach) and other writer events, and  to have taught/mentored some talented up-and-coming writers - one of whom is only 16. I have published a chapbook of poems (and been part of an art exhibition) and am looking at publishing other writers; I have finished my children's book and am awaiting publisher feedback, and I continue to work on my adult novel This Seagull Heart of Mine. 

I also continue to ponder a possible poetry collection and work as an anthologist on a collection of Eastbourne writing. I work every Friday at the local bookshop and next year I'm the NZ Post Book Awards Festival Co-ordinator. 

I'm also a wife and mother, daughter, sister, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, friend, neighbour, and dog-owner, and I live by the sea and walk in the bush, and sometimes I go inland to sit under olive trees. Nga Mihi Nui.

Zombies and Mansfield and me

Zombies - nothing to do with KM - it's a short film my daughter
(centre, white jacket)  is in called A PARTY FOR ME (dir. Amy Brosnahan) 

Oh the bliss of language. Just now, this morning, sitting with coffee in dressing gown (yes, a bad habit, but if I get dressed there will be things to do), I am filled with it, like Bertha in Katherine Mansfield's Bliss is filled with the glowing pear tree against the jade sky.

I have been reading Mansfield you see - but not via the usual route. The book I am close to finishing is Mansfield with Monsters (Steam Press) to review on Wednesday on Nine to Noon (Radio NZ). These are Katherine Mansfield's classic stories but with the gothic/troubled element developed by authors Matt and Debbie Cowens via zombies and vampires and other beings of the horror genre. I know, weird. But I'm enjoying it! The version of The Doll's House in here will not allow me to read 'I seen the little lamp' the same way again.

It's been bliss reading KM's marvellous language again, fun to try out this zombie stuff (not my usual milieu), and then there's the added pleasure of digging out my copies of her original stories and enjoying those too - the ones I know and the ones I don't.

More language tumbling about me this week ...in the form of tantalising extracts of Kirsty Gunn's new novel The Big Music out there on the internet (see previous blogpost) and I see there was a rave review in The Independent this weekend calling The Big Music a masterpiece! Fantastic.

And there's more. I have finished my children's book. I thought I had finished it a couple of month's back, I told a few close friends and my children so, but I couldn't quite let it go (another bad habit). I let it sit on the computer here. Popped in and out. Fiddled. Yesterday. Done. I can't quite believe it (which is probably why I've buried the announcement in the middle of a post).

I have also finished a short story to share with my lovely local writing group tonight. It's been sitting on file for 25 years  - weirder and weirder - and troubling me for some time. I loved it as it was but no-one else did that I showed it to. I started revamping it for the Grimm fairy tale competition (rewrite one of the classic fairy tales as a modern tale) but failed to get it done in time (fancy that).

I believe the new version is better, although the old story is ghostlike behind it... and having read KM's Bliss this weekend, I realise that what I had before was something that had that sort of rush of unmanageable feeling about it - I hadn't thought that until now - while the new story doesn't, is more prosaic somehow, but despite that, is more engaging emotionally? Anyway, I'll be interested to see what the group thinks. 


It just shows what a writing group can do. Deadlines and expectations are good for me. Trust, too - we trust each other with our work: drafts, meanderings, rewrites .... There are seven of us - men and women - ranging in age from 40s to 80+ and writing a range of genres including spy thriller, horror, children's fiction, creative non-fiction, literary fiction, poetry, memoir... with half of us shifting around between those genres from week to week and the other half sticking to ongoing projects. We meet monthly and we have a meeting tonight. I am so looking forward to it. 


Meanwhile, I guess I should get dressed and walk the dog. In its own way, bliss. 

The bliss of Kathleen's Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield, The Storyteller by Kathleen Jones (Penguin NZ) is a triumph - I am still reading it and I am well and truly wound tight in its web. For a start the writing is so immediate, and then there are all those 'mysteries' resolved. I just had to share some of it ...

Here's an Extract at the very beginning: 

What, think you, causes me truest joy

Down by the sea – the wild mad storm of waves

The fierce rushing swirl of waters together

The cruel salt spray that blows, that beats upon my face . . .

The song of the wind as I stretch out my arms and embrace it

This indeed gives me joy.

KATHLEEN BEAUCHAMP, 2 MARCH 1906

 The first thing you notice in Wellington is the wind. A full southerly buster was blowing as I drove in around the bays of the harbour, hurling the waves onto the rocks. At the hotel on Tinakori Road, shutters slapped and banged in a crazy percussion, just as Katherine described in one of her earliest stories, 'The Wind Blows'. I recognised the way it blew the stinging dust 'in waves, in clouds, in big round whirls', heard the 'loud roaring sound' from the tree ferns and the pohutukawa trees in the botanic garden, the clanking of the overhead cables for the trolley buses. Clinging to the car door to steady myself, the street map levitating from my grasp, I experienced the exactness of Katherine's images – 'a newspaper wagged in the air like a lost kite' before spiking itself onto a pine tree; sentences blew away 'like little narrow ribbons'.

Tinakori Road, where Katherine was born and where her father occupied progressively larger houses as his status rose, runs along a steep hillside with spectacular views of the city. Above it, a tree- clad slope climbs upwards towards the ridge and below it, houses stagger downhill towards the brief fringe of level ground that edges the circular bay, enclosed by hills.

More here. 

Sixty thousand books and more

THIS WEEKEND SAT 9-5 PM, SUN 10-4 PM Wellington Events Centre


This post is partly for fellow Tuesday Poet and KM biographer Kathleen Jones who is visiting New Zealand from the UK, and is interested in Wellington's magnificent annual 60-thousand book book fair. Kathleen called to say she was in Wellington and could we meet up, so I suggested Saturday after a trip to the fair. 


I have never met her but have had the pleasure of getting to know her via the Tuesday Poem blog - a NZ-created hub where poets from all over post poems on a Tuesday. I also have, to my joy, a copy of Kathleen's brand new biography Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller (Penguin). Here she is on how her book updates what we already know about KM. 


“It’s the only biography to be written since all the documents relating to Katherine and her husband John Murry became available in the public domain. Katherine’s letters and notebooks have all been transcribed and printed and the diaries and letters of John Murry are now also in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Additionally I’ve had the help of the family who still have quite a lot of material relating to both Mansfield and Murry. There’s a lot of new information. It’s significant that most of the leading figures in the story are now dead, so information is less likely to be withheld to protect people.” More from the interview by Tim Jones HERE. 





There's more on Kathleen Jones I've gleaned: she lives in the Lake District with her sculptor husband and has written 11 books especially biographies of women writers like Catherine Cookson, appears to translate Spanish, travels a bit (Italy, Cuba, NZ) and writes poems. And here she is promoting her new book. All rather exotic, really. But on the phone she simply sounds nice and Lake District. 


Kathleen spoke in Wellington this evening to, I hope, a good-sized audience, but unfortunately I had another can't-be-missed meeting so wasn't there. Wonderfully, we have organised to meet the day of the Book Fair. She has to visit KM's birthplace first so isn't up for the all-important early fair forage (it's become a ritual), but later, she might. I wonder how much space she's got in her suitcase . . . 

The bliss of Mansfield

“What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?...”  Katherine Mansfield.

Mansfield fan, scholar and poet, Elizabeth Welsh reports on the recent Katherine Mansfield symposium in Melbourne, and explains how reading the passage above aged 14 sent her in pursuit of the provocative, elusive, brilliant Mansfield. Her enthusiasm is, quite frankly, infectious. And the paper she delivered? ‘Mansfield’s ellipses as phenomenological markers of time’. You've got to be a fan...


She begins her report:

As a scholar, enthusiast and society member I was recently fortunate enough to attend Katherine Mansfield, the ‘Underworld’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’Symposium held in the UNESCO city of literature, Melbourne.  I was there to present a paper and to soak up all things Mansfield.  Having spent the last five years immersed in Mansfield studies I was in my element. ... more here at Morph magazine.

Elizabeth is our latest Tuesday Poet, too, by the way. You can catch her poetry here. 


And another enthusiast enthuses on the symposium .... this time it's my mate Maggie Rainey-Smith - a near-neighbour, novelist and Mansfield fan who lives within a stone's throw of Mansfield's family bach in Days Bay, Wellington. I guess where Elizabeth's report is 'in the... mind of', Maggie's is 'in the footsteps of':  

First, as I wandered down the wide pavements of Melbourne where the fat autumn leaves lay undisturbed, I marvelled at the difference and also the similarities between Wellington (birthplace of KM) and Melbourne, where the Symposium was being held.   I don’t think Katherine ever visited Melbourne, but it occurred to me that she would have loved it (as it is now), so stylish, cultural, and definitely a place to find a classy tea shop.  more on Beattie's Bookblog.